THE PULL OF THE STARS, BY EMMA DONOGHUE

 

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Wednesday, March 17, 2021

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In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders -- Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police , and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue (Room) once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds. 

 

The Exiles, by Christina Baker Kline

HWPL READERS BOOK DISCUSSION 

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2021 

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 Christina Baker Kline (The Orphan Train) recreates the beginnings of a new society in a beautiful and challenging land, telling the nineteenth century story of Australia from a fresh perspective, through the experiences of Evangeline, Hazel, and Mathinna. While life in Australia is punishing and often brutally unfair, it is also, for some, an opportunity: for redemption, for a new way of life, for unimagined freedom. Told in exquisite detail and incisive prose, The Exiles is a story of grace born from hardship, the unbreakable bonds of female friendships, and the unfettering of legacy.

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Monogamy, by Sue Miller

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

at 2:00 PM

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Graham and Annie have been married for almost thirty years, a loving, successful marriage. Graham is a bookseller, and a large man in every sense – big as a bear, gregarious, a lover of life and the host of frequent, lively parties at the home he shares with Annie. At the moment the narrative begins, Graham has had a short, impulsive affair, one he regrets almost instantly and is determined to end.

Annie is smaller, more reserved, maybe more unknowable, something her daughter Sarah has accused her of in her adolescence. She’s a photographer, about to have her first show in five years, anxious that her best years professionally may be behind her. 

Graham’s sudden death and Annie’s discovery of his infidelity propel the action of the book, which traces her in her pain and confusion; and follows also the others affected by Graham’s death – his first wife, Frieda, and Lucas, his son with her; as well as Sarah, Graham and Annie’s child together. 

This is a novel about marriage, then, and loss. About family, and the secrets they keep from one another. About the transformative power of memory, and the triumph of love over death itself. 

 

CIRCE, BY MADELINE MILLER

ZOOM BOOK DISCUSSION

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 16, 2020 

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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch, whose  commanding  narrates Miller's  dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe , a nymph who turns Odysseus' crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: "When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist." (from Kirkus)

THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE: A SAGA OF CHURCHILL, FAMILY, AND DEFIANCE DURING THE BLITZ, BY ERIK LARSON

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WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 18th

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On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally--and willing to fight to the end.

In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless." It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it's also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill's prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports--some released only recently--Larson provides a new lens on London's darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents' wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela's illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill's "Secret Circle," to whom he turns in the hardest moments.  (www.penguinrandomhouse.com)

OLIVE, AGAIN, BY ELIZABETH STROUT

 

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Wednesday, October 21  

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Ten years after Elizabeth Strout won a Pulitzer Prize for her eponymous collection of linked stories about Olive Kitteridge, a difficult but endearing, retired but not retiring middle school math teacher, she returns to coastal Maine with an update — which is just as wonderful as the original.

You don't have to have read Olive Kitteridge to appreciate Olive, Again, but you'll probably want to. Like a base coat of paint, it adds depth and helps the finish colors pop. Explaining the genesis of her sequel, Strout has written, "That Olive! She continues to surprise me, continues to enrage me, continues to sadden me, and continues to make me love her."  (NPR)

THE NIGHT WATCHMAN, BY LOUISE ERDRICH

 

Zoom Discussion Date and Time

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

At 2:00 PM

 From readinggroupguides.com

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather --- who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C. --- this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity, and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel-bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953, and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit and intelligence, THE NIGHT WATCHMAN is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.